I Dunno, What's a Motto With You?

TMI ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!

Do you have a motto in life?

I do, for me it's Question Everything! 

Many years ago when I was in therapy I was constantly being stumped by thoughts that I thought were true, assumptions that I thought were reality, truths that I thought were universal. These assumptions were like huge road blocks in my pursuit of the truth.

While I am fortunate to have been a young girl who knew that her parents loved her and did their best for her...until that day when all of that changed, a day that became my bookmark for everything to come.  From this event forward an event was classified either before or after the divorce: 1977-1978. Those were the hideous years.

I know what I'm talking about.  ;)

Why were those years so pivotal for me?
People get divorced every day!
Those years were acute for me because both of my parents instantly became strangers, delusive, victimy, unavailable, isolating, unhealthy with boundaries and relationships, and oddly spectral.

Both of them, in their own very disparate ways, began to think of themselves first, often leaving the kids completely out of the equation. They were both wounded, I know. It was a period of time when all of those things that I thought I knew were honestly and truly crushed, when the parents that I had known became incredibly inaccessible and self-absorbed, and when my custodial parent began a long-term program of indoctrination and brainwashing and slavishly requiring unquestioned trust.
(I assure you, these words are not too strong or too dramatic; they are completely accurate.)

And the brainwashing was thorough, Man. It was a true brain fuck. I spent many years in therapy where I strongly resisted challenging the truths that I thought I knew.  
It was arduous and painful and extraordinary and odd.

Things finally started to click for me I learned to Question Everything!

And I'm grateful for that moment because the dark years, the missing years, those years that are misty for me, do not go away. Not a single extended family member is aware of how things were for us. Most of them consider me in particular to be disrespectful, cruel, deceitful, perfidious, even profane. They do not know, or cannot know how victimized we were because they, too, are victims of that brainwashing, but they don't even know it. My sibs and I still struggle with this crap today in our forties and fifties.

 ***

But that skepticism and questioning didn't instantly remove religion from my life. It took me another fifteen years or so before I was able to climb out of the religious boat that I clung so desperately to. 
But I did it. The process of challenging all of that, of accepting small, incremental bits of reality seems like it took at least four years or so before the final hurrah of religion left my mind.

The reading, researching, talking, thinking, writing cycle went on for many years. When I read my journals and poetry from those years I still feel the specter of confusion and pain and anguish in which I was drowning in those days.  

I remember where that phrase came from.

I was working with an older guy who was very wise and kind and larger-than-life in my eyes. I didn't share my story with many people; I didn't share it with him. But in how he lived his life he sent out the phrase 

Question Everything!  

and I figured out how to do that in my own life.

It changed everything! Questioning Everything brought me into the light! It is why I am honest-to-a-fault. It is also why it is freaky hard for me to make some types of decisions, because I can so deeply and intimately see both sides to an issue. It is why honesty is essential to me. It is why I will always speak the truth, however alone I am in that. It is why I will stand alone in my integrity. It is why I am so weird and timorous at times. It is why I will raise my children in reality. It is why I am perceptive and intuitive at the same time that I am unaware of things.  I question everything.

Try it.
Try Questioning Everything and see what happens.
You might just learn something...about yourself and about this amazing world in which we live.

Question Everything!

So, do you have a motto? 

..................
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